Zambia

Swiss confections, food and nutritional products giant launches Nestlé Cerevita Instant Sour Porridge as affordable nutrition for consumers in Southeast Africa. With micronutrients often lacking in consumers’ diets there, it was developed in about one year by scientists at Nestlé's R&D center in Côte d'Ivoire.

Regulators have pulled out all the stops in their efforts to get the Ebola vaccine to the marketing authorization stage in Africa. 

New funding has been provided for more trials of Novartis’s combination malaria treatment in west and central Africa, adding to ongoing efforts to tackle the disease on the continent. 

An app for reporting adverse drug reactions developed by Europe’s Innovative Medicines Initiative is being tested in two African countries, where the mobile infrastructure is said to be more advanced than in EU. The app is expected to help in the collection of ADR data from malaria programs and from general medicines use.

Catalyst Principal continues east Africa health care investing; GOED MOU with US-China Health Products; class action against IntenseX dismissed; Prime Nutrition brand under Hi-Tech roof; and more news in brief.

Do you know how drug prices are set in Guam, Kiribati or Micronesia? Or whether countries like Bhutan, Papua New Guinea and Uzbekistan use external reference pricing (ERP)? If not, you're in good company. The World Health Organization and Health Action International have no idea either, and have asked people living in 39 countries around the world to let them know whether they operate any kind of drug pricing systems, and if so whether these include ERP.

Pakistan is the first country in South Asia to introduce a pneumococcal vaccine into its national immunisation programme, through support from the GAVI Alliance.

Cipla and the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi) have announced a collaboration to develop a four-in-one antiretroviral (ARV) combination for HIV-infected children.

The Indian firm Glenmark will export generic oncology drugs to thirty countries around the world from its newly opened plant in the Pilar industrial park in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Cipla has developed a ‘Mother-Baby Pack’ of antiretrovirals (ARVs) and antibiotics aimed at preventing the mother-to-child transmission of HIV/AIDS.

This week (20 - 22 September) in New York, while world leaders attend a UN high-level summit to help accelerate progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the body that represents the pharmaceutical industry around the world, the IFPMA, has reminded them that pharma does good deeds, too. However, some critics say the industry needs to do more.

Pfizer and the not-for-profit organisation Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV) marked World Malaria Day (on 25 April) by signing an agreement to develop a fixed-dose combination product for the intermittent preventative treatment of Plasmodium falciparum malaria in pregnancy.